March 9, 2014

Ann odd phenomenon of Southern California are regions of extreme density per room. You'll be driving through an area of one story houses and two story apartments, when suddenly there are people everywhere, with guys selling oranges on the corners of side streets.

Sixteen-year-old Monica buried her face in a pillow, trying to rest for school the next day, as the clock ticked past 11 p.m.

Sleep was a battle in the tiny apartment. Hunched at the other end of the family's only mattress, two of her brothers played a video game while a third lounged next to her, watching virtual soccer players skitter on screen. Her 2-year-old niece toddled barefoot near the door, toying with a pile of pennies.

In all, seven people live in this wedge of space in Historic South-Central, including Monica's mother and the mother of the little girl — the longtime girlfriend of one of her brothers. They squeeze into an apartment roughly the size of a two-car garage, sharing a bathroom, a small kitchen and one common room."We're not comfortable," Monica's mother, Josefina Cano, said in Spanish. "But what can we do? It's better than being on the street."

Cano and her family live in one of the most crowded neighborhoods in the country. Nearly 45% of the homes there are considered "crowded" — having more than one person per room, excluding bathrooms, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data spanning 2008 to 2012. Almost one home in six is severely crowded, with more than two people per room.

Southern California is an epicenter for crowded housing: Out of the most heavily crowded 1% of census tracts across the country, more than half are in Los Angeles and Orange counties, a Times statistical analysis found. They are sprinkled throughout areas such as Westlake and Huntington Park around Los Angeles, and Santa Ana and Anaheim in Orange County.

From the outside looking in, it is a largely invisible phenomenon. Places such as Maywood and Huntington Park, south of Los Angeles, look little like the high-rises of Chicago or Boston. Yet behind the closed doors of small bungalows or squat apartment buildings, they are home to thousands more people per square mile than those large cities.

... Around South Gate and Huntington Park, Head Start instructors who visit children at home find they have trouble focusing amid the hubbub. In the Florence-Firestone area, longtime resident Paula Trejo said, street parking is always scarce.

UCLA and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers have found that children in crowded homes have poorer health, worse scores on math and reading tests and more behavioral and emotional problems — such as tantrums and depression — even when poverty is taken into account.

"I don't think anyone really wants to live in overcrowded conditions," said Larry Gross, executive director of the Coalition for Economic Survival. "But people will endure it because they have no choice."

Every inch of the apartment that Cano and her family share is consumed: Bags of clothing are heaped in the only closet. Atop the heater, under a can once used to collect funeral donations, sits a box with the ashes of Cano's late son, who endured seizures and died in his teens.

... Experts say building is unusually difficult in Los Angeles, one of the factors contributing to the affordable housing shortage.

The cramped conditions echo an earlier era, when urban reformers railed against teeming tenements. After World War II, bigger homes and better incomes afforded Americans more space, and the shrinking size of families fueled the trend by 1970. But crowding rates began creeping higher again after the immigration wave of the 1980s, census data show.

In Southern California, "that boom drew in a lot of immigrants who were very poor when they arrived," USC demographer Dowell Myers said. "And they came into a market of very inflated prices."

... Today, Latino households in the Los Angeles area are more than a dozen times more likely to be crowded than white ones.

Some scholars argue that crowding tends to be higher among Latinos and Asians because it is more accepted in their cultures, providing a survival strategy when workers strain to cover the rent. ...

Mexican and Vietnamese Americans tend to have different views than whites or blacks do of what is "crowded," according to a 2000 study, but they still suffer worsening anxiety and depression as crowding increases.

Gabriel Guerrero, for instance, complains that the noise is too much. Twelve people crowd the two-bedroom house in South Gate that he bought decades ago. After school, the clamor of the television and the chatter on phones overwhelms him.

"To go to the bathroom, you have to take a number," the 60-year-old grandfather said with a sigh. At times, his son heads to the nearby grocery to use its restroom.Sometimes Guerrero daydreams of selling the house and finding an apartment for just a handful of them. But then he thinks of his grown children, and their growing children, muddling along with meager paychecks or measly hours.He sets the daydream aside. "They have nowhere to go," Guerrero said.

You can't understand the causes of the subprime housing bubble of the 2000s without keeping in mind the density of modern Los Angeles. LA spun off all sorts of people desperate to get away to Las Vegas, Phoenix, and the Inland Empire.

I have always wondered why just building more multi-story apartment buildings isn't brought out more often as the solution to this problem. Obviously this was and is hard to do in New York City, but in most other places I suspect building heights are over-restricted. In Los Angeles the threat of earthquakes may have something to do with this.

Alot of the rise in housing prices (both rents and purchase costs) is abetted to the seven-immigrants-to-a-room phenomenon more directly. By being willing to live this way, immigrants can afford to pay the high rents! Middle class people who refuse to live this way have to relocate to the suburbs. Otherwise we would see more demand fall out of the urban housing market.

oh and around the same time (1971) my old bachelor second cousin, a history prof at USC, was murdered by a Mexican gang who dumped his body down by the tracks in downtown LA. Last time I saw him he showed me all the port wines he'd brought back from his last trip to Italy. Such clueless innocent people, no idea what was coming.

What happens is that you have this perfect cultural storm of ethnic groups that value familial support above comfort. "Too much of a good thing."

As Gabriel the Grandfather said, it sucks, but he's not about to kick his family out to the street.

Mexican-Americans have fallen into an underperforming collective rut in which grandparents bought homes and showed solid responsibility while their offspring have been anything but. As a whole, Mexican-Americans thrived in a manufacturing, blue-collar culture, but that paradigm is rapidly coming to an end as White Collarization has become the Only Way.

Funny comment from Sean Thomas in thr Telegraph about London: 1. If Polish labourers sleep four to a room “in bedsit slums”, it’s because they choose to.http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/seanthomas/100262783/mile-high-apartments-full-of-trillionaire-villains-london-according-to-the-new-york-times/

Sometimes Guerrero daydreams of selling the house and finding an apartment for just a handful of them. But then he thinks of his grown children, and their growing children, muddling along with meager paychecks or measly hours.

If Guerrero is an immigrant, than that means the 2nd generation, and the third generation are not fairing any better. Isn't this what Richwine was trying to point out with latinos? It really looks like we've imported a permanent underclass.

Where are the progressives of the early 20th century, didn’t they fight against tenements and overcrowding? Now they fight to bring in more people and turn a blind eye the new tenements.

Of course those same early progressives also fought against ethnic crony government hiring and instituted objective testing for new hires, now they talk about disparate impact and want quotas for their cronies of the right ethnicity

I know someone who rents a two bedroom apartment in LA to Mexilatinos, they will say in the lease that it's just one person or a couple, and then they bring in illegally the mother, father, aunt, brother and three nieces, two dogs, etc.

Yes it is expensive to live in LA but that is also part of the same phenomenon, massive immigration of poor Mexican natives overcrowding all and the "good places" to live left becoming concentrated in just a few neighborhoods with ultra high rent.

It's sad. Maybe LA used to be a nice city, years ago. Check out the comments here now:

I love the euphemisms. We don't want people in overcrowded conditions! No, we prefer poor people spread out where they don't take up all the parking! Where they aren't so loud!

It is unfortunate that we have forgotten what poverty is, and what people are willing to do to get out of it.

It would help if people at least realized that people go where there is work. Want less "overcrowding"? Stop hiring them.

Though as a side note, whenever I brought east coasters to visit Beverly Hills to see "how the movie stars lived" they were shocked and appalled that the houses were built so close together. WASP middle class sensibilities understood distance from neighbor as a measure of class. SoCal never did as it was lacking that WASP culture.

Um, like where the hell is Planned Parenthood? Sheesh. They need to be going door to door making sure these chicks are taking their pills. Get them IUD's or something. Who the hell is sharing a two bedroom house with 12 people and then add a crying baby to the mix? Nuts! Those folks have a high pain threshold.

People in Mexico seldom live the way the Los Angelinos are in the article. Mexican city planners and engineers understand the needs of growing families and populations and how to accommodate them comfortably on limited land.

American city planners know how to plan for Americans to live in houses on bigger lots with yards and wide streets with lots of free parking and drive to work and school which are also surrounded by vast oceans of free parking. The two planning styles are incompatible and that's why poor Americans and immigrants live so badly.

Well, if it weren't for the immigration, the poor Americans would be doing a lot better, of course, but the system would still disadvantage them.

I prefer to live under the Mexican model. My libertarian side prefers that people should decide how to build on their own land and not have whole cities commanded from above to follow one model or the other. But it's probably too late to decide anew how LA is built. The planners and Washingtonians that have decided to turn the USA into a Latin American nation have built a misery wedge for Angelinos far into the future.

I commented already but I wanted to add that because to housing scarcity and building patterns in LA are so badly adapted to the current population, the effective standard of living is much lower than it could be.

In fact, the average college graduate in Mexico City has a higher material standard of living than the average LA college graduate. Which is better culturally is a matter of opinion but if you compare income to cost of living, Mexico City is richer

The propensity of Hispanics to cram jam into housing creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that causes more need to cram-jam and therefore more cram-jamming. The more people you have in a house, the more paychecks or welfare checks there are coming into the house. Replicate this situation in just about every house in these areas of severe residential overcrowding in SoCal, and all it means is that more money in the household will only mean that rents on the same sardine boxes are bid up and up and up and up. And this prices people and households with only one income or even two out of the rental market.

If it were up to me, Hispanic immigration would not have happened and would be reversed. But in the absence of that, a good temporary holdover solution is for local and state ordinances to limit landlord-tenant-lease contracts such that only two residents' incomes can be used to pay rent and at that only a certain percentage of the one or two lessees' net incomes can be used for rent.

Mexican-Americans have fallen into an underperforming collective rut in which grandparents bought homes and showed solid responsibility while their offspring have been anything but.

Similar to African-Americans in the North. The early migrants from the South did relatively well and were able to buy homes. Yet their children couldn't keep up. In Detroit, Baltimore and Philadelphia many of the homes have been paid off, aren't worth anything but house multiple family members.

Steve, I just spent an evening in downtown LA near Staples center. The renovation of downtown has been extensive. But I still noticed many seemingly empty office blocks and apartment buildings. And there are the lofts, which a friend who knows the area tells me are prohibitively expensive.

Have you been to Irvine recently? New housing developments are coming up like crazy. I suspect the city means to develop every last square foot, probably to accommodate all of the imported Asian settlers.

I live near Crystal Cove state park, which includes a gorgeous beach and about 2400 acres of pristine inland wilderness. It is surrounded by new housing developments in Newport Coast, which is home to rich Chinese oligarchs who recently fled China.

Sadly, I can easily imagine the developers paving over Crystal Cove, too.

>In fact, the average college graduate in Mexico City has a higher material standard of living than the average LA college graduate. Which is better culturally is a matter of opinion but if you compare income to cost of living, Mexico City is richer<

Mexico City is the urban jewel of Mexico and therefore it is an outlier. Mexico in general is crowded, poor, and backward. I saw extremes of wealth and poverty. D.F is comfortably liveable in my opinion, but the average town...forget it.

Where are the progressives of the early 20th century, didn’t they fight against tenements and overcrowding? Now they fight to bring in more people and turn a blind eye the new tenements.

Of course those same early progressives also fought against ethnic crony government hiring and instituted objective testing for new hires, now they talk about disparate impact and want quotas for their cronies of the right ethnicity."

Long about 1930, something happened to the concept of "progressive". A different set of ideas came to be called "progressive", and it happened because a different kind of person came to be called "progressive".

Nice baseball stat from Bill James: The best starting pitcher of the last 60 years (apparently records are sketchy before 1953),as measured by performance in "tough games," [road games aganst .550+ teams]:

Juan Marichal, 29-9, 2.24.Go Giants!

By the way, James is a standard liberal, constantly talking about "racism."

Sometimes Guerrero daydreams of selling the house and finding an apartment for just a handful of them. But then he thinks of his grown children, and their growing children, muddling along with meager paychecks or measly hours.If Guerrero is an immigrant, than that means the 2nd generation, and the third generation are not fairing any better. Isn't this what Richwine was trying to point out with latinos? It really looks like we've imported a permanent underclass.

Who says the later generations are not faring any better? They are better fed, better housed, better educated, in better health, etc. In fact, 2nd and 3rd generation MExicans surpass their "bracero" grandparents in income, education and other key metrics as Thomas Sowell noted way back in 1981.

Where are the progressives of the early 20th century, didn’t they fight against tenements and overcrowding? Now they fight to bring in more people and turn a blind eye the new tenements.

Actually the progressives- read white liberals- still do fight viciously against new tenements, especially in their neighborhoods. Which is why stiff zoning regulations against expanded multi-family or multi-unit housing (non tenement housing mind you) is so popular among them in many places. Such can be used under "race neutral" cover to restrict the supply of housing raise prices and thus keep those dusky types out of their mostly white sub-divisions and schools. But at the same time, they can still talk expansively of "diversity" and how cool they are...

David saidOf course those same early progressives also fought against ethnic crony government hiring and instituted objective testing for new hires, now they talk about disparate impact and want quotas for their cronies of the right ethnicity

Not quite. They actually made only moderate progress to prevent ethnic crony hiring. Masters of ethnic cronyism like the white Irish managed new manipulations behind the scenes to hire their white cronies as seen fit. Impossibly short application time windows, selective advertisement of jobs to only certain people, "grandfather" clauses that allowed incumbents to escape testing, rigged selection boards that used test scores "in combination" with "other" factors to ensure white only hiring, test questions that had little to do with job content, etc etc are all dodges and manipulations revealed in employment lawsuits.

Socially Extinct said...Mexican-Americans have fallen into an underperforming collective rut in which grandparents bought homes and showed solid responsibility while their offspring have been anything but. As a whole, Mexican-Americans thrived in a manufacturing, blue-collar culture, but that paradigm is rapidly coming to an end as White Collarization has become the Only Way. ----------------------------------------------------------

^^Not quite. In fact numerous Mexican Americans have, like other Americans in the burgeoning service economy, shifted to white collar occupations, particularly women, and have prospered. And blue collar occupations like the trades, car repair etc that can’t be easily outsourced overseas are holding their own fairly well. Hell, ever seen what a plumber charges lately?

Anon says:Similar to African-Americans in the North. The early migrants from the South did relatively well and were able to buy homes. Yet their children couldn't keep up. In Detroit, Baltimore and Philadelphia many of the homes have been paid off, aren't worth anything but house multiple family members.

Dubious. Actually income, education and wealth has increased in 2nd generation urbanized African Americans as any census set of data shows, and as credible scholars like Thomas Sowell repeatedly demonstrate. This data holds even after the hollowing out of the industrial base due to “progressive” outsourcing and other factors bringing manufacturing decline.

Look at satellite photos of LA and you will see that in Hispanic areas, lots that at one time had a single family house with front and back yards have had extensions built onto the front and back or even a whole new house built in the backyard, so that buildings cover almost the entire lot.

I once lived on a city block in Manhattan that had something like 4,000 people living in pre-war high rises. Yet we had no orange vendors on the street.

Who says the later generations are not faring any better? They are better fed, better housed, better educated, in better health, etc. In fact, 2nd and 3rd generation MExicans surpass their "bracero" grandparents in income, education and other key metrics as Thomas Sowell noted way back in 1981.

Read the quote. The guy in the article won't sell his house because his kids, 2nd gen, and their kids, 3rd gen, won't have any where to live. That is pathetic. His adult kids live in his home with their children. Most people generally would move out and have their own place before starting a family. If his American-born kids haven't done this, they have not moved up the social ladder much, if at all. Heck, they maybe even have fallen a notch.

Also, the Braceros were from the 1960s. More than likely Guerrero came here in the early 1980s. He is not a bracero.

White kids in Brooklyn live three and four to an apartment that should only hold two.

Where are the progressives of the early 20th century, didn’t they fight against tenements and overcrowding?

Those early 20th century "progressives" abandoned all their early causes because the real point of those causes was to bring themselves into the seat of power. Having achieved power they then turned their "progressive" views into weapons to use on the people they felt had held them down in the first place. That's progress!

Same thing happening in London. Millions of people pouring in from abroad, good houses being subdivided and subdivided agaib, immigrants sleeping in shifts, four to a room, rents soaring, wages stagnating (at best). The only solution proferred is to build, build, build. But this will annihilate what remains of England's countryside. Something of great beauty, and a source of precious food, will be gone forever. Hello favelas/Hong Kong/Blade Runner.

As for "Research Data", why don't you post under your normal handle of "Grover Prosling"? You are the most hardline anti-white/European poster on iSteve, and there is some serious competition for that title.

In 1990, I was divorced and living in Orange County. My apartment rent in Newport Beach was killing me (about $800), so I went and looked at apartments in cheaper areas like Santa Ana, since my children attended private school and I didn't care about public school quality. What a surprise! The apartments in Santa Ana were much worse -- older, smaller, poorly maintained & inhabited by riff raff but the rents were just as high. I think the difference was that the building managers in Santa Ana didn't care as much about your credit rating, and didn't try to evict you no matter how many people moved into your unit.

White people were already moving out of California at that time, and I'm sure the pace has only quickened. The schools are rotten, the traffic is unbelievable, and the cost of housing is just absurd. Salaries might be a bit higher in California than the rest of the country, but not by much.

High density and the accompanying high maintenance costs, would see to explain the otherwise puzzling fact that the rent on a nice new clean apartment is only about 1.5 times the rent on a crappy apartment in a building that looks like a recycled Motel 6.

"So, Asian Americans outscored all large Asian countries (with the exception of three rich cities); white Americans outperformed most, but not all, traditionally white countries; and Latino Americans did better than all Latin American countries. African Americans almost certainly scored higher than any black majority country would have performed."

It would be interesting to see if the gaps between US scores and scores for the various source populations vary according to whether the source country also adds iodine to salt (as listed in this WHO report)

Assuming the latitudinal argument for IQ variation is true - which it obviously is even if the PC culture will never admit it - then more interestingly (to me anyway) what explains the differences **between** populations from roughly the same latitudinal bands?

Is the PISA map (within equilatitudinal bands) an iodine in childhood map?

When enough friction between bodies due to density combined with kinetic energy occur, these energized bodies give off excess energy, which we perceive at certain frequencies as light. This is sometimes called "vibrancy".

Never saw any donkey shows but observed an interesting bare-fisted boxing match, well-attended, in an open, bombed-out-looking courtyard in my street. The street itself was a free range for wild dogs. Cancun this was not.

I live in an average small village in rural Mexico, in the Central Highlands. Most information here is somewhat out of date.

Even the smallest villages are getting paved streets; and slowly are getting a central water system, and just behind that a sewage system.

The number which have Internet and cell phone system is also growing.

The illegals when they return have learned much, and realize they need not live in terrible conditions. Not in the area of cleanliness. Not in the area of politics. Google Autodefensas.

Economists have been saying for some time that in another generation Mexico is expected to be the economic powerhouse of the Western Hemisphere. I could write a lot on that topic. Just in the last 5 years, I see big differences.

Thanks to Anon @ 10:26PM for mentioning Coulter's mention of Steve. (Coulter mentioning him can only be good.)

As to your query: it took just minutes to go from Steve's links of subjects he's covered, i.e., "Environment" to this: "California desperately needs a slower population growth rate until it learns how its current vast population can live with its lovely but sometime lethal landscape." And there's more.

You can't understand the causes of the subprime housing bubble of the 2000s without keeping in mind the density of modern Los Angeles. LA spun off all sorts of people desperate to get away to Las Vegas, Phoenix, and the Inland Empire.

I think just about every city in the Case-Shiller indices had inflated real estate values bar Detroit.

One of the reasons why the powers that be want to drive population density up is that the nations that run trade surpluses with us tend to be not poor, but overpopulated relative to us, and likewise it is underpopulated, relative to us, nations that we run our own trade surpluses with. Consumption gets more efficient as population density goes up. while the supply of workers is obviously much higher.

So yeah, utterly ruining the average American is part of the plan, if only they'd get it.

Guerrero, the guy in the article whose kids are living with him, came to Los Angeles in an era when housing prices were much lower, and jobs paid better and were more plentiful.

His kids are probably doing OK, my guess is that they are employed at respectable working-class occupations-- delivery truck drivers, etc. -- but housing is a lot more expensive today than it was in 1974.

The second and third generations of Hispanics in Los Angeles generally don't show downward mobility. They are generally upwardly mobile. They don't go to dental school, but they get blue-collar jobs that require fluency in English, legal status, and some education. The guys drive FedEx trucks, work as assistant managers of Jiffy Lube, etc. The women work as cashiers at Staples and as receptionists in offices that cater to a Hispanic clientele.

You seldom see second generation kids working as landscapers, at the car wash, pushing a paleta cart or selling corn with mayonnaise and chili powder, etc. The illegals do those jobs. So there is upward mobility. Some kids even get onto the college track, I know a guy who grew up in South Gate -- the town where Guerrero lives -- who went to Princeton on an affirmative action scholarship. He's obviously not typical, but guys like him are out there.

Some second generation Hispanics join gangs or fall into the welfare underclass, but that's relatively rare. Most of them make it into the working class. They also assimilate fairly well, from a cultural perspective. Some become cholos and act tough but most become generic working class American kids with Hispanic ethnicity, plenty of them are into skateboard culture and the like.

The problem is that the second and third generation Hispanics are subject to the same economic forces as the rest of us. If housing is unaffordable for the college-educated white middle-class couple, it is even more unaffordable for the second-generation working class Hispanic who works at Jiffy Lube. The massive population increases affect everyone.

Why is Monica trying to sleep at 11pm while a toddler is walking around? Why is a TV allowed on after 9 pm? Why are high school age kids even awake after 10pm? I knew large Irish families that crowded into bungalows on the west side of Chicago, two to a room, but strict parental control over schedules and noise levels kept homes reasonably quiet and orderly. Most Irish mothers were fanatical cleaners and caretakers, and adolescents stayed out of the house until dinner time, either studying in libraries, playing sports with friends, or working at after school jobs. Sounds to me like a more effective strategy to not only survive but thrive. Many of these Irish kids grew up to buy nicer, larger homes and have fewer kids than their poor immigrant parents.

Interesting. Thanks for your comments. My only knowledge of rural Central Mexico until recently was "God's Middle Finger" by Richard Grant. Fascinating book if anybody is curious about "los Indios" in the Sierra Madre.

In 1986, after graduating w/ a BS Computer Science from a school in Boston, I turned down a job offer from the City of LA. I'm not sure if that was a good decision - yes, I would have had to deal with the congestion over the years, but I would have got in on the LA real estate market early enough to make a killing and I'd now be ready to retire on a nice LA city pension.

Anonymous at 2:12pm - the media (in Britain at least) have "moved on" almost completely from the Russia/Crimea situation. There is almost nothing about it on BBC television, the BBC website or the newspapers today. My sense is that watching the media is almost like watching the markets when it comes to gauging exactly how serious a situation is. It may be that journalists are just like rest of us and don't want to think too hard about potentially apocalyptic outcomes, but in my experience the opposite is true and they absolutely revel in them.

A further suspicion (or is it a hope) that I have is that if the time ever did come when tensions between nuclear powers reached breaking point, the men with their fingers on the button (literally - senior military commanders and submarine captains) simply wouldn't push it. Obviously in 1945 that wasn't the case but maybe we can't extrapolate too far from that.

A further suspicion (or is it a hope) that I have is that if the time ever did come when tensions between nuclear powers reached breaking point, the men with their fingers on the button (literally - senior military commanders and submarine captains) simply wouldn't push it. Obviously in 1945 that wasn't the case but maybe we can't extrapolate too far from that.

I definitely wouldn't hope for that, it isn't like this has never occurred to the Navy or other missile forces. A huge amount of effort,on many dimensions, has been expended over many decades to ensure that when the order is given by political leaders, that missiles will actually be launched. My impression is that at least most of them will. And, again, it isn't like nobody has ever thought about commanders balking and not having planned/designed for this contingency.

"A further suspicion (or is it a hope) that I have is that if the time ever did come when tensions between nuclear powers reached breaking point, the men with their fingers on the button (literally - senior military commanders and submarine captains) simply wouldn't push it."

A good number of American service men were threatening to walk off the job if ordered to attack Syria. I can assure you that the young men serving in the military today are much more libertarian and nationalist leaning than they were in 2003.

There has been a collapse in the number of younger, conservative leaning Americans who support neocon, Bush and establishment type politics.

Libertarian/paleocon/nationalist/dissident right type views are becoming more common among the younger generation. There is hope, so all the chicken littles can lower gun from their temple.

A good number of American service men were threatening to walk off the job if ordered to attack Syria.

Footnote or reference of anything more serious than some Internet blowhards on a forum or two? Anything anywhere near the opposition that, say, blacks put up in the service in the 60's and 70's which, while serious, didn't completely neutralize any units.

I can assure you that the young men serving in the military today are much more libertarian and nationalist leaning than they were in 2003.

I'd really love to believe that and maybe there is an iota of truth here. But my guess is that any increase in these types is totally lost in a much larger sea of PC individuals, economic refugees with fat wives, pill popping hypochondriacs, etc, etc.

We all heard how everyone there was going to rebel if they put gays in the barracks, submarines or woman in infantry, etc. Job is nearly done without so much as a peep from the enlisted and much exultation from the officer staff, even the Commandant of USMC, which really pains me.

Talk and bluster is really cheap and common among military guys. I think you've been taken in by some of this.

Can you start blocking comments with that mincing "dear boy" form of address? It hasn't been used on me, but I find it extremely annoying and rude by the poster that keeps doing this."

MMMM, and I thought that iSteve readers were made of sterner stuff than Oberlin students. Perhaps an iSteve "Micro-aggressions" section is in order, for those who find the shocks of daily life too much to bear?

Anonymous:"It is at least as offensive as swearing, etc, which I'm sure you must filter out since I see none of that."

"It is at least as offensive as swearing, etc, which I'm sure you must filter out since I see none of that."

No kidding. If someone disagrees with me I'd rather they just call me stupid to my face than this annoying "dear boy" business. In fact, I'd be more likely to actually read the body of the response with the former.

Whoever you are, if the Effete English mannerisms are your thing, I suggest you use the less offensive "I say, old chap".

Inequality will continue, because of our demographics. As we bring in more Chinese and Indians, they'll be successful, while other groups won't be as successful.

Despite living in "crowded" housing, I'd bet most of them still prefer their current situation to having to return to their former countries. It's all relative. We can't all live in nice homes (we tried and got the Housing Bubble), if our productivity isn't high enough or if our liabilities are too many.

They still have TVs, food, relatively safe area to grow up in, access to education, a roof, and opportunity. If their children make better choices, then they'll have that chance to live better.

Guess where more illegals are heading to Texas. Lower unemployment more service and construction jobs there but conservatives always love Texas. In fact Houston has sections that look like Santa Ana now. Pew Hispanic show Texas gain 50,000 in 2012 illegals Mexicans and Central Americans while California lost them. Illegals go where there are jobs unlike Blacks that access welfare more.

Steve, I just spent an evening in downtown LA near Staples center. The renovation of downtown has been extensive. But I still noticed many seemingly empty office blocks and apartment buildings. And there are the lofts, which a friend who knows the area tells me are prohibitively expensive.

Have you been to Irvine recently? New housing developments are coming up like crazy. I suspect the city means to develop every last square foot, probably to accommodate all of the imported Asian settlers.

I live near Crystal Cove state park, which includes a gorgeous beach and about 2400 acres of pristine inland wilderness. It is surrounded by new housing developments in Newport Coast, which is home to rich Chinese oligarchs who recently fled China.

Good point both La and Orange according to the US Census are getting more Asian immigrants than Latin. The Latins have larger families and are younger and will gain more in the next 10 to 20 years but LA may turn from Hispanics to Asian in 20 years.

In 1990, I was divorced and living in Orange County. My apartment rent in Newport Beach was killing me (about $800), so I went and looked at apartments in cheaper areas like Santa Ana, since my children attended private school and I didn't care about public school quality. What a surprise! The apartments in Santa Ana were much worse -- older, smaller, poorly maintained & inhabited by riff raff but the rents were just as high. I think the difference was that the building managers in Santa Ana didn't care as much about your credit rating, and didn't try to evict you no matter how many people moved into your unit.

SO, go to Texas you have the same thing. Its cheaper though to get away from Mexicans but maybe not in 15 years. I predict more crowding in Texas will increase housing in 10 years to at least regular pricing the days of cheap housing in Texas will disappear as more people are told to moved there.

It is at least as offensive as swearing, etc, which I'm sure you must filter out since I see none of that.

Everybody say hello to the new guy.

But dishonest contractors (white, American) hire these people, screwing Americans out of jobs.

We don't want them here, do we?

But I bet everyone, including you guys, hires them.

If the police stop enforcing the laws, those who wish to remain solvent will stop obeying them, like everyone else. Doesn't mean they don't want the police to go back to enforcing the law. This is why they came up with the ad hominem attack fallacy.

In short, why should good people choose to suffer needlessly? To satisfy the moral demands of sociopaths like you?

"continual dropping will wear away a stone — nay, a diamond".

Imagine the sort of loser who uses "dear boy" all the time and the stone builds itself back up.

I'm sure some were but generally it was not their forte. My Irish mom always used her ethnicity as an excuse. Her brother had an iq of 160 tested in the military during WWII, but he later drove a taxi (and got fired when he asked a couple passenger to wait while he stopped the car to get a little drop) and died an alcoholic in a charity institution.

Any quietude from the Irish segment was due more to stupor than discipline.

Here's the Google Wallet FAQ. From it: "You will need to have (or sign up for) Google Wallet to send or receive money. If you have ever purchased anything on Google Play, then you most likely already have a Google Wallet. If you do not yet have a Google Wallet, don’t worry, the process is simple: go to wallet.google.com and follow the steps." You probably already have a Google ID and password, which Google Wallet uses, so signing up Wallet is pretty painless.

You can put money into your Google Wallet Balance from your bank account and send it with no service fee.

Google Wallet works from both a website and a smartphone app (Android and iPhone -- the Google Wallet app is currently available only in the U.S., but the Google Wallet website can be used in 160 countries).

Or, once you sign up with Google Wallet, you can simply send money via credit card, bank transfer, or Wallet Balance as an attachment from Google's free Gmail email service. Here'show to do it.

(Non-tax deductible.)

Fourth: if you have a Wells Fargo bank account, you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Wells Fargo SurePay. Just tell WF SurePay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). (Non-tax deductible.)

Fifth: if you have a Chase bank account (or, theoretically,other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay (FAQ). Just tell Chase QuickPay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it's Steven Sailer with an n at the end of Steven. (Non-tax deductible.)

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